Psalm 44

Kiš had good reasons for writing about the Holocaust, and an unenviably close vantage point for doing so. He was born in the northern Yugoslav city of Subotica (Hungarian: Szabadka) on February 22, 1935. His home region, technically the Bačka but commonly referred to by the more expansive designation of the Vojvodina, had been part of medieval Hungary before being captured by the Ottomans in early modern times; it then became part of the Habsburg Empire for well over two hundred years before World War I; after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the Great War, this multi-ethnic, multi-confessional region, which is home to Serbs and other South Slav groups as well as Hungarians, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Germans, Roma, Jews, and others, was included in the new country of Yugoslavia. Kiš’s mother, Milica Dragićević, was an Orthodox Christian from Montenegro, and he spent the immediate postwar years in that Yugoslav republic, following his repatriation from Hungary. Kiš’s father, Eduard, was a Hungarian Jew. A railroad inspector with a difficult and in some ways troubled personality, Kiš’s father also had something of the visionary and philosopher in him; both his obscured personality and his tragic fate dominate the affective world of many of Kiš’s works. The family tried, with mixed results, to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism on both sides of the shifting Hungarian-Yugoslav border in the late 1930s and early 1940s. When the war finally ended in 1945, Kiš, his mother, and his sister Danica were leading a deliberately low-key but physically and emotionally very difficult life in rural southern Hungary; his father had been rounded up for forced labor and later was deported and then killed by the Nazis. The war years, the Holocaust years, the years of exposure and hatred and invidious otherness, are famously portrayed in Kiš’s magisterial novel Hourglass, but they are also an indispensable constituent element of his poetry, the untranslated short stories, and in his drama Night and Fog.¹

This novel, then, is obviously one that was very important to Kiš peronally. But it was an early novel, written in 1960 and first published in 1962, paired with The Attic, which he had started in 1959 but also completed in 1960. As a work of relative youth, written when the author was in his mid-twenties, the book exhibits certain lapses or excesses, infelicities or imbalances, the correction of which gives us, in his later works, insight into Kiš’s artistic and intellectual evolution. In his interviews, Kiš himself would occasionally wax wry or wistful about the novel, revealing a guarded or even critical attitude toward Psalm 44. Kiš based the novel on a true story reported in the newspapers at the time, and he wrote it as part of a competition held by a Jewish cultural organization in Belgrade. He felt, though, that the novel made its points too directly, without enough lyricism² or “ironic detachment.”³ But he believed that the book addressed a need in postwar Yugoslav literature, with its “latent resistance to Jewish subject matter”⁴ and, one supposes, its Manichean depictions of the war aimed at mobilizing and militarizing Yugoslav society. Kiš also saw the book, and his other Holocaust writings, as the first bookend of what I call his great project of convergence — his unmasking of the twin “totalitarian” leviathans (or ideological dictatorships) of the twentieth century, Nazism and Soviet communism.

Perhaps Kiš was thinking of the prominent role of his deus ex machina, or of the heavy-handed recasting of Mengele as “Dr. Nietzsche,” when he later referred to the book’s plot as “too charged, too overwrought.”⁵ But ultimately the graphic brutality of some of the scenes in Psalm 44, as well as the unexpected and highly evocative details — the interplay of light and wire and walls, or some of the bodily sensations of the protagonist, Marija — help key the reader’s emotions to the pain and gravity of the subject. And Kiš’s portrayal of life in the Vojvodina during the heyday of fascism is a rare (and beautifully written) testimony about this under-studied regional chapter of the one huge Holocaust. Native fascism, local collaboration with the Nazis, myths of ancient ethnic hatreds, the envy and insecurity that lie at the psychological root of anti-Semitism, the violence against women — the presence of these historical themes in the narrative makes Psalm 44 far more important than any hasty characterization of it as “provincial” might vouchsafe. No part of the Holocaust was a sideshow, just as the Shoah itself was not a footnote but rather a necessary condition of and an integral component of the Nazis’ geo-strategic and military aims.